Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo (15 page)

In the words of the
Mississippi’s
executive officer, George Dewey, “As it turned out, we were anything but past the point. We starboarded the helm right into it and struck just as we developed a powerful momentum. We were hard aground and listing.”

Dewey would later become the hero of Manila Bay, where his fleet of warships decimated the Spanish fleet, and he would utter words that have come down through naval history, along with John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight,” Oliver Hazard Perry’s “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” and James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship.” As the great Spanish-American War sea battle was about to commence, Dewey turned to the captain of his flagship,
Olympia,
and calmly said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

Dewey was a handsome man with black straight hair, bushy sideburns, and a great mustache that he kept until his death in 1917.

With guns blasting, engines pounding with every ounce of steam the chief engineer could coax from them, and paddle wheels thrashing the water, old
Mississippi
refused to budge. The Confederates took happy advantage of the stationary target lit up by the nearby burning house, pouring in shells and a swarm of bullets from the rifle pits. As the ship struggled helplessly to back off the shoal, the number of dead and wounded climbed appallingly.

Dewey hunted for Captain Smith and found him lighting a cigar as coolly as if he were standing at a garden party. “Well, it doesn’t look as if we could get her off,” said Smith, almost indifferently.

“No, it does not,” Dewey replied.

At that moment, a fiery hot shot tore into the forward storeroom and set the inflammable supplies and matériel afire. A holocaust soon spread out of control as flames quickly reached the decks above. Looking around at the destruction and his mortally wounded command, Smith had to face the sad prospect of losing his ship.

“Can we save the crew?” he asked Dewey.

“Yes, sir.”

Shells had shattered the three boats on the side facing the enemy, but those on the port side were still seaworthy. Dewey directed a crew of able-bodied men to load the worst of the wounded into the first boat and directed the crew to row to one of the ships downstream.

Dewey supervised the loading of the lesser wounded and some that were unhurt. He was frustrated to see how slowly the boats returned. The oarsmen were decidedly unenthusiastic about making the trip back once they reached the temporary safety of the other ships. Unable to speed up the boats’ return to the burning ship, Dewey swung a line into a boat just as it was about to push off with a load of crewmen.

Though Dewey was reluctant to desert his ship, his decision turned out to be a wise one. He and the acting master, Joseph Chase, had to use their revolvers to make the men row back. If Dewey hadn’t slipped aboard, none of the boats would have been available to rescue the rest of
Mississippi’s
remaining crew.

Upon returning to the main deck, Dewey approached Smith and hastily explained his temporary absence. He motioned to the two empty lifeboats alongside, indicating that they would not be there save for his initiative and fortitude.

“We must make sure none is left aboard alive,” Smith said evenly.

What began as a compelling search soon turned into a grim nightmare. Dewey quickly selected five men to accompany him throughout the disabled warship. Bodies had to be closely examined in the dark and smoke to see if any of the men were still alive. They were very careful to make certain no spark of life remained, or the poor man might lie there, powerless to move, as the flames crept closer and closer.

They moved belowdecks, shouting that there was little time left to abandon the ship. Luckily, they found a young cabin boy who was still breathing despite being buried under a pile of dead bodies that had been cut down by bursting shells. Satisfied that only the dead remained on board, Dewey was then ordered by Smith to make absolutely certain that old
Mississippi
would be totally destroyed before falling into Confederate hands.

Dewey ran to his stateroom, snatched off the mattress from his berth, and dragged it to the wardroom, where he sliced it open with a dress sword, piled chairs and tables on top of it, and then threw an old oil lantern into the debris, igniting a roaring fire almost immediately. Only then did he and the few men left on board join Captain Smith in the last lifeboat.

They pushed off from the hull aft of the paddle wheels and immediately were caught in the powerful current and swept downriver. As they looked back, a giant torrent of flame burst through the skylight of the wardroom that Dewey had set ablaze. The Confederate guns fired away at the lifeboat but fortunately failed to score a hit. At the sight of the flaming ship, the entire bluff above the river broke into a rebel yell. The victory was theirs.

Farragut’s fleet had come within an inch of total disaster.

Smith seated himself in the stern of the lifeboat, still puffing nonchalantly on a cigar while Dewey manned the tiller, and the men rowed through the splashing shells until they reached the safety of the battle-scarred
Richmond,
anchored downriver out of reach of the Confederate guns. During their flight, Smith took off his sword and revolvers and threw them into the river.

“Why did you do that?” Dewey asked him.

“I’m not surrendering them to any rebel,” he said haughtily. It was a hasty decision Smith would come to regret.

A humorous episode occurred when the men of
Mississippi
boarded
Richmond.
While Dewey was setting the fire in the wardroom on board the doomed ship, Ensign Dean Batcheller snatched up a dress uniform coat hanging in the cabin he shared with Ensign Francis Shepard. The rest of the crew, including Smith and Dewey, escaped with only the clothes on their backs.

Proudly, Batcheller held up the coat. “At least I’ll have something to wear for the ladies in New Orleans.”

His cabin mate Ensign Shepard leaned over and eyed the coat. Then he looked up and grinned. “Thanks very much, Batcheller, but that’s
my
coat.”

And so it was.

Dewey was greeted by a close friend from his Naval Academy days at Annapolis, Winfield Scott Schley, who was destined to command the fleet that would destroy the Spanish fleet off Santiago, Cuba, at almost the same time Dewey was making his mark in the Philippines.

Back at the battered
Mississippi,
the river flowed in through the engine water-delivery pipes that had been cut by the engine-room crew before they abandoned ship. Because the hull was grounded on an angle with the bow slightly raised, the incoming water flowed toward the stern. The added weight lifted the bow, and she slid free off the shoal. The current turned her around so that now she was moving with her bow pointed downstream. The port guns that had been loaded but not fired now faced the Confederates. As the flames reached their primers, they began firing a ragged broadside in a final act of defiance. Dewey solemnly described the sight as “a ship manned by dead men still firing at the enemy.”

Engulfed by a sheet of fire that raged through the pummeled ship,
Mississippi
was carried downriver by a four-knot current. The shriek of steam escaping from the ship’s safety valve cut through the pandemonium of gunfire. Flames burst from her rigging and erupted into the night sky, casting a flickering orange blaze of light that illuminated both shorelines as bright as day. Looking like a floating, flaming pyramid,
Mississippi
was a funeral pyre for the dead aboard. It was a sight never forgotten by both the Federals and rebels who watched her fiery passage in the night. Her death would later be described as a grand spectacle.

Several reports from both sides in the battle put the frigate sliding off the shoals at 3 A.M. and drifting down around Profit Island, her flaming hull reflecting in the sky until 5:30, when the fire reached the twenty tons of gunpowder in her magazine and she blew up in a tremendous explosion. The ensuing concussion shook the country for miles around and rocked the Union ships from stem to stern. Such was the end of the brave old paddle steamer.

It was somehow fitting that the river she was named for became her burial shroud.

Perhaps Dewey himself paid
Mississippi
her greatest tribute when he stood on the deck of
Richmond,
stony-faced and deeply saddened as he watched her die. He said, “She goes out magnificently.”

II

Nothing Stays the Same
1989

THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE OF RIVERS AND THEIR SHORELINES. Unless it’s the Colorado flowing through the Grand Canyon on the same course for thousands of years, most rivers, particularly the Mississippi, change their course on a daily basis. The riverboat
Sultana,
chronicled in the first
Sea Hunters
book, burned and sank a few miles above Memphis in 1865 with a loss of two thousand lives. Our mag search put the remains two miles from the present course of the river, eighteen feet deep in a farmer’s soybean field in Arkansas.

The final resting place of the gallant old frigate
Mississippi,
where she has lain ignored and forgotten since that horrendous night in 1863, is not under the present river channel, either. In the approximate area where
Mississippi
was last seen, the river has moved almost a mile to the west and has become an immense bog.

Because I did not feel it was fitting or proper that “lost in obscurity” be Mississippi’s epitaph, I cleared my desk after finishing another Dirk Pitt adventure book and began the research in preparation for the hunt for Mississippi.

Relying on researcher Bob Fleming in Washington, who combed the archives, we amassed a mountain of material that we eventually sifted to a ten-inch pile. Then began the investigation to estimate a ballpark for
Mississippi’s
location. One of the first things we had to consider was the possibility that she had been salvaged. Fortunately, a probe through the naval archives revealed no such attempt. Part of the reason was a report that she had exploded in the middle of the channel and sunk in deep water, which would have been between eighty and a hundred feet, a depth that would have made it impractical to undertake a salvage operation 140 years ago.

Since none of the contemporary reports gave a clue to the exact location where she had blasted herself to bits and gone down, and no distances were given to still-existing landmarks, I had to base the search on the time element. With the river running at a known four knots, it didn’t take a great strain of my pitifully inadequate talent for mathematics to figure that Mississippi drifted a distance of ten to eleven miles before she sank.

There were one or two Confederate reports that put the site of her explosion close to the wrecks of the ironclad Arkansas, destroyed by her crew a few months earlier. But we had discovered the ironclad eight years before under a levee sixteen miles below Port Hudson at the bend of the reach before it dropped toward Baton Rouge.

The ten-mile distance was consistent with contemporary references. Spears’s biography of Farragut states that “she reached the foot of Profit Island when the fire reached her magazine and she blew up.”

A. J. C. Kerr, a Confederate veteran from Corsicana, Texas, stated later in his memoirs that “the
Mississippi
blew up ten miles below Port Hudson.”

The log of the Richmond also stated that “the
Mississippi
drifted down the river and blew up ten miles astern of us.”

George S. Waterman recounted that “the Mississippi floated down the river a short distance below the fleet when the fire reached her magazine.”

And finally, there is a sketch of the river and gun emplacements at Port Hudson with a notation by William Waud, a war artist who was on board
Richmond.
“Air very thick with smoke. The
Mississippi
drifting down in flames, exploding near the land pier.”

The last was a good reference point, except there were at least six piers along that stretch of river in 1863. Then, to muddy the water, Waud never indicated what he meant by “land pier.” Upper Springfield Landing was the closest to the projected site. Also, two contemporary wrecks were marked on the old chart, one on top of the other, on the west bank below the bend in the river. Over the passing of a century or more, the encroaching swamp had covered them and left their remains a good half mile from the present river flow Since they were unnamed and appeared to have run aground, we eliminated them as
Mississippi.
Also, it seemed likely that if one had been the Union frigate, the chart maker would have labeled her as such.

Next came the important process of overlaying a new chart showing the present course of the river as compared with an 1868 chart. It quickly became apparent that the approximate spot where we computed
Mississippi
to lie was now nearly a quarter mile west in a huge bog called Solitude Point.

Springfield Bend, as the area that traveled around the point was called, had filled in toward the east. It was encouraging, but we still felt we stood a slim chance.

Having taken it as far as we could go, we decided it was time to gather up the equipment and head for Louisiana to begin our search.

In May of 1989, Craig Dirgo and I arrived in Baton Rouge and arranged with the West Baton Rouge parish sheriff’s department to once again borrow their great little aluminum boat for a river survey. Accompanied by a deputy and his son-in-law, we launched the boat on a hot, humid day under a clear sky. Relying on NUMA’s EG&G sidescan sonar and the Schonstedt gradiometer to find a promising target, we set out hoping for the best, expecting the worse, and willing to settle for anything in between.

We began surveying the river thirteen miles below Port Hudson and ran north past Profit Island, which has changed very little over the past hundred years, to within six miles of where Mississippi grounded and began her drift. I had been told that the Army Corps of Engineers had surveyed part of the river where
Mississippi
had grounded and had recorded several large anomalies on the riverbed, but we found it as barren as the Mojave Desert. Nothing remotely resembling a wreck was discovered, and no targets worth investigating. There was one wreck depicted on an old 1880s chart against the east bank, but we found no trace of it. Not surprising, since the records show that it was likely dredged out of existence many years ago.

The southern tropical heat, shaken and stirred with 100 percent humidity, nearly did in Craig. With no wind to cool the sweat surging from our pores, the atmosphere was agonizingly oppressive. Many people think it is cooler on the water when the weather is hot—not necessarily so. You have little shade on a small boat, and the steaming water can easily raise humidity off the scale when there is no hint of rain from a cloudless sky.

The Solitude Point swamp is not only huge, it’s impassable. You couldn’t walk, wade, or swim through it, much less penetrate it with a jet ski. Interestingly, the 1836 chart fails to indicate it because it had yet to make its presence known. Oil drilling has since taken place inside the swamp, and pipelines stretch outward like legs on a spider, three of them traveling up the river to the north.

Unable to conduct a mag survey from the surface, I turned to Joe Phillips of World Geoscience, Inc., in Houston, Texas, and arranged for a helicopter geophysical aeromagnetic survey. Using a Bell 206 Ranger equipped with a SCINTREX vapor magnetometer sensor, a Picodaas digital acquisition system, and a GPS navigational system, they launched the survey in August of 1999.

Flying tight ninety-foot lines at an altitude of less than a hundred feet, they found the oil field west of the point without any trouble. Paying special attention to the 1864 course of the river, they easily picked up the magnetic anomalies from the two riverboats aground below the point. Then, almost precisely at the ten-mile drift projection of
Mississippi,
a large anomaly appeared on the magnetometer recording. It was almost directly in the middle of the old river passage. The target was three quarters of a mile inside the swamp from the river’s west bank. They also determined that it was very close to the long-gone Springfield Landing pier mentioned by the Civil War artist Waud. Another encouraging indication was the computerized profile of
Mississippi,
showing a large iron mass that would have included guns, shot, anchors, and many tons of ship’s hardware.

Was it
Mississippi?
Until we could actually touch a piece of it, there would be no uncorking the champagne.

That was about as far as we could go in our search. We reeled in the sensors, packed the equipment, and headed for a Cajun restaurant. We had done our best and would leave it to future archaeologists, historians, and shipwreck hunters to probe the depths of that loathsome swamp.

Mississippi
would be a fascinating wreck to excavate since she hadn’t been salvaged, and even despite the damage from the explosion, she had to be relatively intact. Unfortunately, any excavation more than eighty feet deep in the middle of a bog would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

It seems that
Mississippi
will remain under Point Solitude for a long time to come, perhaps for eternity. You never know if it’s best that way.